If you’re not familiar with the Oculus Rift, let me provide some background. It’s a virtual-reality headset that is expected to be released as a consumer device sometime in the near or far future, we’re not sure which. Whenever it happens, though, it will be a big deal, because it considered the first time that legitimate, actually immersive virtual reality will be available to consumers. It received its initial funding of $2.4 million through a Kickstarter campaign back in 2012, and was recently purchased by Facebook for $2 BILLION, much to the chagrin of everyone, myself included, because we are now uncertain as to its future. What does Facebook want with it? They say they’ll leave it alone, but many are unconvinced.

It has so much promise that it lured legendary programmer John Carmack away from id, the company he founded and where he developed groundbreaking, landmark games such as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake, to work on the emerging technology.

Although I haven’t had the chance to test it myself, everything I have read about it is beyond impressive. Every single description of it from people who have tried it has been that it is a revolution in immersiveness. It is a set of screens that fit over each eye in an enclosed visor, which presents a stereoscopic 180-degree image to immerse you in the environment, and has fully implemented head tracking; that means if you turn your head to the right, the view shifts to the right.

But it has application beyond games. Very serious, useful, and wonderful application beyond games. Consider this story about Roberta Firstenberg. Roberta was fighting a losing battle with cancer, and was lamenting to her granddaughter, a game developer, that she missed the simple things like going outside.

This seems to be a common reaction to the Oculus Rift

That gave her granddaughter an idea: she wrote to Oculus, and asked if she could get a kit for her grandmother who was ill. They lovingly obliged, rushing her a developer’s kit with a demo of walking through Tuscany in Italy. It afforded her the closest thing to being there and walking around, just as it will give us the closest thing we’ll experience to walking in a spaceship or haunted house (profanity, be careful) or dungeon – or even getting your head chopped off in a guillotine simulator! She got a lot out of it as you can tell in her descriptions, and although she eventually lost her battle everyone believes the virtual reality experience really helped her to cope during that difficult time. I’ve embedded the video below, but i encourage you to read the full story.